No Sex in My City: Models and Mortals

Season 1, Episode 2: Models and Mortals

“What am I? Your intellectual beard for the evening?”

Miranda discovers that she’s on a date with a “modelizer”. Yes, apparently there are men who choose to only date women with a very particular occupation. Miranda is horrified, not just at finding out this nice guy is actual pathetically shallow, but that she is just an experiment date since she’s clearly not his type. Bringing up the subject of models at dinner brings out everyone’s insecurities, which I find hard to watch. These women are smarter than that! Carrie looks deeper into this modelizer world by visiting a known modelizer, who basically emobdies the worst qualities you can imagine in a man, objectifying women as “things”. Things that he collects by taping himself having sex with them. Samantha doesn’t find this as disgusting as the rest of us, instead she sees it as a challenge to be worthy of being taped. While Samantha validates her looks, Carrie spends the night getting to know a male model. Even he thinks models are dumb. No modelizer solution is found, but we end with another great line from Big. “After a while, you just want to be with the one who makes you laugh."

Favorite Outfit

Carrie looks great in a simple little black strapless dress. The super long chain necklace thing is super 90's, but I'm kinda into it.

Character I Most Identify with: Samantha
Samantha wins for confidence in this episode, as she usually does. When the women are all listing their physical traits that they don’t like, Samantha is silent. She likes the way she looks. High-five, Samantha! Teach those girls a lesson! Shut up about your thighs, your chin, your nose, or whatever you think is your flaw and realize that you are beautiful and sexy and amazing, intelligent women! Don’t let the media tell you what the ideal woman looks like. Samantha is always confident because she knows that she is beautiful, stylish, smart, sexy, powerful, successful, everything she wants to be. She has no reason to let a model on the cover of a magazine make her feel bad about her own body, and neither do you! Comparing ourselves to other women never ends well. There is no ideal woman. We are all so different in looks, smarts, personality, interests, careers. That’s why we’re so amazing, and why guys fall for us!

“I think you’re luminous.”

There’s a lot of model hate going on here. “They’re stupid and lazy and should be shot on site.” I don’t think we’d talk about models like this anymore. The 90’s was the height of the “Supermodel”. Since then, there have been countless reality shows exposing people to the fashion & modelling worlds, and now just about every female celebrity is also a model. The modelling world is no longer a mystery, we know what they go through and what their job can entail. We also know so much about the top models thanks to magazine profiles, interviews, and their own social media. Models are not seen as a separate species anymore and there is more diversity in the modelling world, so that spotting a “model” on the street is not so obvious.

This “modelizer” phenomenon isn’t about men only being attracted to attractive women. “Attractive” is subjective. This is about men with no imagination blindly following what the media tells them they should be attracted to. The show only uses models to illustrate the point because, as I said, this was the Time of the Supermodel. These days, there are so many beautiful famous women thrown in a man’s face everyday, that his ideal woman is a combination of his favorite physical attributes from various women. The worst part of this “ideal woman” concept is that women get sucked in by it, too! We put pressure on ourselves, and other women, to fit into whichever body ideal that we choose to subscribe to. Some women make themselves miserable trying to shrink down to a bony runway model body type, but women who are naturally thin wish they had curves. Small breasted women wish they had something to put on display, while large-breasted women wish they could pull off those deep-Vs without looking like porn stars. It seems like we all want what we don’t have because what we have never seems good enough to attract the men we want, or impress the women we envy. The easy solution to all this is to just accept your body, and everyone else’s body.

But, what headlines would they put on magazine covers, how would they market anything, if they couldn’t prey on women’s insecurities, hmm?

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